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Sunday, February 21, 2010

Schjeldahl Beats Saltz by Two Dead Women

"I, for one, would rather see a tightly organized overview of Mr. Zucker’s work than Marlene Dumas’s warmed-over Expressionism, which was recently displayed in bulk at the Museum of Modern Art"

Strange sour note in an article that otherwise didn't have a bad thing to say about a single artist, and a lot of artists were named. What is up with them and Dumas? To borrow one of JS's shopworn phrases, it's as if she is living rent-free in their brains. Weird.

Schjeldahl Beats Saltz With Two Dead Women

I don't get how JS keeps up this appearance of being a champion of women. How many reviews dedicated to the solo show of a woman has he written in the past YEAR? One.... and it was Georgia O'Keefe. Talk about shut up or nut up. Even Schjeldahl, who also didn't review the solo show of a living woman in the past year, beat JS by two dead women.

Yes, it's 2010 now. 2009 was spent on Facebook calling out MoMA. I'm half-expecting the upcoming JS Whitney Biennial review to be half-about the half-representation of women... and fully expecting his Facebook commenters to give him 87 'Like's and 470 You Did It Jer!s.

Think how much more effective it might have been for them to write an open letter to Roberta Smith instead of Ann Temkin. Hah! Since 2/20/09, Roberta has written fifty-four 'Art in Review' pieces devoted to solo shows, with fifteen of those on women artists. In the past FIVE MONTHS there have been twenty-four such reviews... with only FOUR of them on the work of female artists. It's a groaner that none of those Facebook people says anything.

Herbert Vogel on the Cedar Bar, from the Herb and Dorothy documentary - "The Cedar Tavern was an extraordinary place for the artists to let their knowledge and anger out at the same time". It'd be nice if some old Cedar Bar regular would get on that Facebook page and go Lloyd Bentsen on it.

4 comments:

re: Dumas Feversomething i have noticed about groups of people in general is that sometimes, one strong personality gets excited about a particular thing, and maybe says something a lot of people find very impressive, and then everybody else slurps it up & regurgitates it back to everyone they know so that other people will think THEY are impressive. this is just an observation on the behavior of humans in a group environment.

So funny, so true! Unfortunately:( It's like when they're being all lo-fi and casual on facebook and blogs they can talk about how unfair it all is, but when it comes to publish something in the 'real' press, all that goes away, and it's mostly the dudes that pass muster...